I didn’t go inside WSB14. Couldn’t afford it at the time, and honestly the idea of sitting through another PowerPoint about “resilient urban ecosystems” made my stomach knot. But I was in Barcelona that week in 2014, wandering with nowhere much to be, and you couldn’t miss it. Posters plastered across the metro, curling at the edges by the third day. Big banners outside the Palau de Congressos. World Sustainable Building Conference. The future of construction, or so the slogans went.
I walked past the venue one afternoon. Delegates spilled out in clumps, badges swinging, tote bags sagging with leaflets. A tangle of accents — English, Spanish, Catalan, German. The sharpest memory isn’t anything they said; I didn’t hear a word of the sessions. It’s the smoke. A dozen architects standing in the heat, puffing away, grinding Marlboro ends into the pavement. Inside: slides about low-carbon living. Outside: ash and coughs. That image has stuck with me longer than any slogan.
Back then I was still chained to Manchester, still juggling subcontractors and spreadsheets and green certifications that meant very little in practice. I knew the word sustainable was already worn thin, but I wanted to believe WSB14 was where someone might call time on the box-ticking.
Ten years on, I live here. Mid-forties now, divorced, my daughter Emily still back in Manchester with her mum. I send her too many photos of cranes she doesn’t want. One late night I saw this old conference domain was up for sale. Expired, abandoned, like a chair left out in the rain. I bought it. Half a joke, half a refusal to let it vanish.
So did WSB14 deliver? Walking this city, you get a very mixed answer.
Some of it changed, yes. The buses don’t belch like they used to — plenty run on gas, a growing fleet on batteries, though half of them seem to conk out at the stops. Recycling bins squat on nearly every corner. Plastic bags are rarer. Rooftops here and there sprout panels, though never at the scale the presentations promised. A neighbour in Eixample even bragged about an insulation grant that shaved a chunk off her winter bill. Small wins.
Keep walking, though, and the cracks show. Literally. Glass towers down by Diagonal Mar, designed to look sleek in brochures, roasting tenants alive by June. Flats in Gràcia still bleeding heat all winter, pensioners wrapped in coats indoors. Pepi downstairs running two plug-in heaters every January, her electricity bills like a bad joke. Construction sites draped in banners screaming sostenible while slurry trickles straight into drains. I watched a crew one morning chuck cigarette butts into wet concrete under a sign about “building the future.”
That gap between what’s written and what’s lived — between policy and plaster — is still yawning. On paper, organisations like the Green Building Council España keep pushing standards forward. They were behind WSB14, and they’re still publishing roadmaps and rating systems. But out here, on foot, you see how much gets lost between paper and brick.
I don’t need conference papers to tell me. I’ve got scaffolding nets that sag for months, buzzing lights on sites that never finish, the smell of dust when another wall comes down. I’ve got Pepi cursing her bill. I’ve got crane counts — yesterday was nine, though only odd numbers “count” in my silly tally, so by my own rule that means none.
WSB14 wanted to be a turning point. Maybe it nudged us forward. Maybe. But walk long enough in this city and you realise we’re still improvising, still patching, still arguing in stairwells about who pays for what.
This morning I counted five cranes on my route. Or maybe seven — one was half hidden behind a tower and I couldn’t decide if that should be added or not. Emily wouldn’t care either way. Pepi says her next bill is due and she’s already dreading it, though it’s only March. I was going to write more about the conference itself, but the scaffolding net outside my street has been flapping all day and it’s louder than my thoughts.
